A part of my job as a Graduate Teaching Assistant this year is Tort Law – seminars, some undergraduate dissertation supervision and also marking essay and examination scripts. The essay this year was a piece on Campbell and the extension made to Breach of Confidence into Misuse of Private Information.
In the course of marking these essays, my thoughts have turned (inevitably) to Arendt, Adorno, and of course, Rousseau.
The subjective nature of human rights has never been an issue (problem) for me; but Arendt’s seeming approval of Rousseau’s discovery of the intimate was… I wondered what she saw in it that I couldn’t and why she would approve of isolating a facet of the private sphere as being exclusively private since the logical outcome of that isolation would always be identity politics when you consider the social sphere in modern social constructs.
Then it hit me of course; Arendt doesn’t approve of the hybrid ‘social’ sphere and an isolation of intimate thus serves a purpose for her of removing ‘nature’ from ‘construct’ – cleansing political matters of those factors that create inequality. It’s masterful but inherently flawed: the social is both intimate and collectively political; it is too structural (Foucault, more or less) to modernity to eliminate through shutting down State apparatus in favour of localised solutions… Any solution has to be global to truly work, and that means concentrating on the truly universal; not epistemology.
The problem I have with the intimate is not the creation of identity politics as such (although this is an abuse of identity as a characteristic) but the fact that the creation of the intimate allowed and led directly to the concept of “privacy” as a human right, as opposed to something that is “deprived of a public nature” by virtue of being natural rather than constructed.
The answer lies within the extension of the narrative self given by Cavarero, taken from Arendt and moved into the social as a partial construct of story-telling. It’s a start but it didn’t go far enough – the narrative self also appears in certain Bio-ethical methods as well as psychology, and as such it creates a set of rights about itself as a construct that goes beyond freedom of expression and includes that information about ourselves that we choose to reveal… In other words it creates a singular Right that includes both privacy and publicity – there is no question of balancing Rights against one another; if there’s ever a question of balance it lies within the same Right and hinges on the question of who ‘owns’ the narrative of oneself and who, therefore, has the right to disclose or conceal.
This is an easier question to answer in a way that would appear objective to law (although still subjective to Adorno) – and that is why I now propose the elimination of (rights such as) Article 8 of the European Convention… Privacy is a misnomer, and it allows cultural subjectivity and religious intolerance a method to argue that it is not normative. Cultural and Religious objections far from being illogical or wrong at least approach comprehension of the problem – Privacy is wrong in human rights: it is total freedom of narrative that is required; both to conceal and reveal, and not privacy per se.
